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With the deepest appreciation,

David Teachout
Humanity’s Values | Life Weavings

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People fundamentally misunderstand the nature of relationships. As an initial point, the fact that most of you reading this, when you came across the term “relationship,” likely thought I was referring to a romantic one. To be “in a relationship” is so often short-hand for romantic intimacy; it obscures, if not completely makes opaque, the reality that at no time in our lives are we ever not in a relationship of some kind. Rather than being individuals who engage in relationships, we are relational beings who engage in perspective-making, or what we simplistically refer to as individuality.

There are many avenues of inquiry this framing can go down, but as this was inspired by a particular concept called “overfunctioning” that I was introduced to by a client, I’m going to bring the focus to what seeing us as relational beings first can help with.

To start, we are biological creatures. That should come as no shock to anyone. Further, we are biological creatures in every way, from the very top of our heads to the soles of our feet. Contrary to how many people, including many mental health professionals, believe, biological evolution didn’t begin at the neck and go down; it is how our brains and nervous systems evolved as well. Our biological nature is about resource management, which includes everything that involves the expenditure of energy, including behaviors, and that increasingly sought-after resource of attention.

Our brain/body system(s) work by taking from the past to frame our present in preparation for the future. That means we are constantly working at predicting what is likely to be needed for an imagined future. Relationships, with every person we encounter and every object we engage with, are the interactional spaces through which we act on those predictions. We do this through the perspective-making tool we call consciousness, and we cannot mind-read others. This is why dialogue is so important, and humility is such a powerful value.

With that set up, a claim about a relationship, made by one person in it and never checked with the other, is a prediction. It is a perspective. It is not a carefully constructed assessment. Which brings us to “overfunctioning,” as most popular writing misses the difference, and the miss tells us something about how therapy has come to think about people.

The Sign That Isn’t One

Roxy Zarrabi’s Psychology Today piece, 7 Signs of Overfunctioning in a Relationship, seeks to explain the concept, but does so through a common mistake in mental health therapy. Overfunctioning, she writes, is a dynamic in which one partner carries most of the daily responsibilities, starts the hard conversations, and tries to fix whatever goes wrong. To determine whether this is happening, a person only has to consider the signs. The first? You assume that if you take a break, everything at home will fall apart.

Look at what kind of statement that is. It is a forecast. A prediction. It concerns a future that has not happened. Further, it concerns a partner who has not been consulted, and a household whose resilience has not been tested. Zarrabi reads it as evidence of an unequal mental load. It may be. Perhaps. It may also be nothing of the kind, and nothing in the internal sign lets anyone tell.

A cognitive therapist would call the thought catastrophizing and set about helping the client challenge, if not outright dispute, the unhelpful simplicity of it. That is a start, but disputation treats the thought as a reasoning error, a glitch to be corrected. This thought is not a glitch. It is doing specific, functional work.

A Prediction Protected From Its Own Test

Andy Clark and Karl Friston, among others, describe the brain as a prediction engine. We do not take in the present and then decide what to do about it. We draw on the past to interpret the present and prepare for the future, with the body’s resources as the budget being managed. Predictions get revised when the world contradicts them.

There is a second way to keep a prediction intact, though, and it is the one that matters here. You can act so that the contradiction never arrives.

The person who believes everything will collapse without them does not take a break. Without a break, nothing collapses. Every ordinary day of holding it all together counts as one more confirmation. The belief is sealed off from the only evidence that could change it, and it is sealed by the behavior it produces.

Let’s consider the thinking from a different perspective, one more aligned with biology. Steven Hayes and his colleagues built Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on a simple question: not whether a thought is true, but what it serves. Function, in that tradition, is read from consequences. So consider what the catastrophizing prediction, held and acted on, keeps in place:

• One person stays indispensable.

• Decisions keep routing through that person.

• The partner’s contributions are discounted before they are made.

None of this is an accusation about the person holding this belief. The person holding the belief may want none of these outcomes and may be exhausted by all of them. Function describes what a pattern maintains, not what anyone intends. People, including therapists, spend entirely too much time projecting the fantasy of their mind-reading skills to create the intent they don’t actually have access to from other people. The functional question never gets asked until it becomes something to bully people with.

The pattern that emerges has two authors. The partner who steps back, who waits to be asked, who does a task poorly once and is relieved of it forever, is also behaving in a way that has consequences. Murray Bowen saw this decades ago. In his family systems theory, overfunctioning and underfunctioning are reciprocal positions, each one sustaining the other, and the overfunctioner’s activity is in large part a way of managing anxiety. Doing the thing yourself is quicker than sitting with the feeling of it not being done, or, as is often the case, not being done in the way personally desired.

The Auditor Self

Zarrabi does acknowledge that it “takes two people to create this dynamic.” Then the article proceeds as though it takes one. All seven signs she declares as evidence for “overfunctioning” are internal states of a single partner. Every reflective question is addressed to that partner. The remedy is to weigh what the role costs against what it provides, state your boundaries, and renegotiate the tasks.

However, each of those steps assumes an individual self standing outside the relationship with a clipboard, checking agreed-upon boxes. That self does not exist. Nor, likely, do the boxes.

Brian Lowery argues in Selfless that the self is made in relationships. It sits, like a spider permanently attached to a web, at the intersection of them. We are individuals within a collective, not free agents who inspect the available groups and choose which to join. If Lowery is right, there is no outside position from which to audit. The person tallying costs and benefits was formed by this relationship, by the household they grew up in, and by a long cultural education in who is supposed to notice that the fridge is empty. The article nods at this when it mentions caregivers. Then it hands the reader a ledger for an individual to fill out.

Let’s be clear about where this comes from. It is not one author’s lapse. Therapy is organized around the individual: the individual client, the individual diagnosis, the individual hour. A field built that way will keep describing relationships as something a self has, rather than something a self is made of. The seven-signs checklist is simply what that assumption looks like in public. There are numerous other examples of this, from the way diagnoses work to the victimization mentality so many fall into, even at times perpetuated by professionals.

Comfortably Uncomfortable

I use a phrase with clients: comfortably uncomfortable.

Looking for a life of ease, of an absence in disomfort, is a fantasy along the lines of the concept of infinity. The human mind doesn’t actually comprehend it, but it’s a useful tool for promoting certain behaviors, and it’s based on the idea that with enough repetition of a certain thing (numbers for infinity, or a removal of “triggers” for ease), the iteration reaches a perfect state. I’m not a mathematician, so the analogy is likely breaking down at some point here, but the idea that we must simply remove what makes us uncomfortable as a recipe for a mentally healthy life is as old as the mythologies of Eden and the slithery quality of knowledge ruining a good day of blessed ignorance. Within a cause/effect existence, with brains built on predictive processing and associations, the idea that “triggers” will ever go away has as much weight as the fig leaves hiding genitals from an omnipresent deity.

The phrase points to willingness, which is not the same as resignation. In ACT, willingness means staying open to discomfort because something you care about is on the other side of it. That gives two questions to ask in place of the ledger with its boxes to check, and both partners have to answer them:

1. What does this arrangement keep in place, and for whom?

2. What discomfort is each of us willing to carry, for the sake of what we care about?

The second question depends on a point people often miss. A value can stay constant while the behavior that serves it changes. Someone who cares about a home where people are looked after has usually expressed that by doing the looking after. With this particular partner, in this particular dynamic, the same value may be better served by letting dinner be made differently, later, and subjectively worse, and by feeling the anxiety of that without stepping in. The partner serves the same value by acting before being asked and by tolerating being bad at something for a while.

What comes out of that conversation is decided by the people in it. An uneven division of labor can be workable. An even one can be miserable. The measure is whether the arrangement serves what they both care about, and whether each can live inside it with eyes open. The need for dialogue that goes beyond vague declarations to concrete examples and actions should be an obvious requirement here, but I find that it needs to be brought up often.

When the Load Is Real

There is a strong objection to what has been said so far, and it deserves awareness.

Sometimes things do fall apart. Allison Daminger’s interviews with couples found that the cognitive side of household labor (anticipating needs, identifying options, deciding, and monitoring the results) falls disproportionately on women, with anticipation and monitoring the most lopsided. Her sample was small and mostly college-educated, but the finding matches a great deal of other work. For many people, the first sign is the boxes of frustration being checked, resulting in vague but meaningful declarations of catastrophizing.

There’s a worse example as well. “That’s just your perception” is exactly what a partner avoiding the work would say. An argument that treats the load as a story someone is telling themselves hands that partner a weapon.

With that in mind, I want to be as clear as possible. I am not saying the prediction, merely by its utterance, is false. I am saying that a prediction held privately cannot tell the accurate case from the self-perpetuating one. Only exposure to the relationship can. Take a break. Say the forecast out loud to the person it concerns. If the house does fall apart, and the partner shrugs, that is real information, and it is information no list of internal signs could have supplied.

This is why, when I work with the typically male side of the relationship, we focus on taking the non-concrete declarations and start asking for clarification. The encouragement is to move away from the social misogyny of “women are irrational,” — which is also completely false anyway — and towards creating a mutual space of open, clear communication. One that is based on an acceptance of difference in perspective-taking, rather than the destructive quality that mind-reading typically entails.

Two limits should be noted here. Partners rarely have equal power to decide. Money, children, and expectation all bear on what someone is “willing” to live with, and willingness under constraint is not willingness. And the couple is not a closed system. By Lowery’s own account, the people deciding were shaped by relationships far beyond this one. Those examples, and the history of experience that created the past by which the present is being judged in preparation for an imagined future, are all in the room too.

What the Checklist Costs

We need to move beyond checklists to a recognition of the embedded relational reality within which we are constantly moving. None of us chooses whether to be in a relationship, only what boundaries are being established by our actions. When a relational pattern is handed to one person as a checklist, three things follow, and all of them are unhelpful: She leaves with a diagnosis of herself; Her partner leaves with nothing to do; And the prediction at the center of it all, that everything depends on her, goes on untested. This only prolongs needless suffering.

The loss is a recognition of a future that hasn’t been engaged in yet, and a present that is far more full of possibility than our stories would have us believe. A pattern two people make can only be changed by two people, and it can only be seen once it is put between them.

Ask questions. Listen with humility. Build something new.

Sources:

• Zarrabi, R. (2024). 7 Signs of Overfunctioning in a Relationship. Psychology Today.

• Lowery, B. (2023). Selfless: The Social Creation of “You.” Harper.

• Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). Guilford.

• Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family Evaluation. Norton.

• Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.

• Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.

• Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633.

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This post was free to read for all. If you like what I’m doing with Humanity’s Values and want to support my work, there are several ways to do so.

1. Like and Restack: Click the buttons at the top or bottom of the page to boost the post’s visibility on Substack.

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David

The trouble with using AI for therapy is not the AI. Frankly, the AI barely even registers if you’re already reaching out to it to gain personal insight and/or work through concerns regarding your mental health. There are two problems with doing so, and neither of them means you can’t use it for personal reflections and existential ponderings, but by not addressing these problems, many concerns arise for your wellbeing. The first is a set of assumptions about what the machine is. The second is not knowing how to use it. The second feeds into the first, and is often at the heart of so many truly terrible criticisms. AI is a tool and to use it well means having skills regarding “prompting.” In many ways, prompting is a lot like conversational skills, though as with all analogies in discussing AI, they tend to encouraging a humanizing that is best avoided. I cannot emphasize enough that a person who has never learned to prompt well has no experience of the machine’s limits, and so nothing to correct the belief that there is something there that is wise and accurate, answering back.

This is not a new problem.

In the mid-1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum built a program at MIT called ELIZA. It ran a script that imitated a Rogerian therapist by doing little more than turning a person’s statement back into a question. His secretary had watched him build it for months. She knew exactly what it was. She sat down to try it, typed a few lines, then turned to him and said, “Would you mind leaving the room, please?”

She wanted privacy. With a few hundred lines of code.

Weizenbaum spent much of the rest of his career alarmed by that moment. He should have been. Nothing in the program had changed between the months she watched it being assembled and the minute she asked him to leave. What changed was her relation to it. That reaction, 60 years ago, when what we have now would have likely had people reaching for goats to sacrifice for their new overlords, is the whole story of AI and therapy. That the machines have gotten vastly better has simply made the story harder to see, not easier.

The First Problem: Three Assumptions

Eloquence is taken as thoughtfulness. A large language model produces text that is fluent, organized, and often more articulate than what most of us manage on a good day. I quite literally talk for a living, and despite thousands of hours, there are still moments of tongue-tied ridiculousness. Thankfully, as Irvin Yalom noted, “All is grist for the mill.” Unfortunately, when it comes to fluency in language use, we have a lifetime of experience fleshing out the cognitive bias that language like that comes from someone who has empathically reflected on our situation. So when a chatbot returns four well-built paragraphs naming our “pattern of anxious attachment,” we conclude that something on the other end thought carefully about us. It didn’t. Sophisticated phrasing is what the system is built to produce. It is the output, not evidence of a deliberation behind the output. A response can be clinically literate and still have no one in it.

Warmth is supplied by the reader. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson used the term empathic projection for the embodied capacity to imaginatively occupy another’s position, to feel our way into someone else. It is one of the best things about us. It also doesn’t check whether there is someone to feel into. One of my favorite examples for this is the soccer ball “Wilson” from Tom Hanks’s movie “Cast Away.” We can also consider Tamagotchis, digital palm-sized “pets” from the 1980’s that had kids weeping when they “died.” Outside of socially created empathic unions with inanimate objects, we read a sentence like “that sounds incredibly painful,” and we hear tone, care, and can imagine someone leaning in as an expression of concern. Every bit of that is from our own mind’s eye. And it is not neutral: we hear the emotional quality we came looking for. The person who wants permission hears permission. The person who wants to be told they were wronged hears that they were wronged. Frankly, this is true within human relationships as well, and the oft-repeated though curiously in modern times, easily forgotten criticism of echo chambers. What the interaction with AI removes, and not for our benefit, is the at least tentative possibility that because we know there’s a human being on the other end of the dialogue, there are variations in verbiage that lead to uncertainty.

The pattern is mistaken for a presence. These systems are trained on an enormous spread of human writing: conversation transcripts, advice columns, forum confessions, textbooks, novels, arguments. When a reply sounds like someone who has been where you are, that is because thousands of people who had been there wrote about it, and the model is drawing on the statistical shape of what they said. It is the echo of a crowd, compressed to the infinitesimal yet infinite feeling of our personal ego. The appearance of conscious feedback is what a very large amount of human experience sounds like when it is averaged and returned in the second person. We are simply not even close to being as unique as we think we are, for a machine not to be able to collate enough data to mimic our projected desired outcomes.

What the Evidence Shows

Pat Pataranutaporn and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab ran the experiment that should help us end the confusion. Three hundred and ten participants talked with a mental health companion chatbot. Before the conversation, each was told one of three things: the AI had caring motives, the AI had manipulative motives, or the AI had no motives at all. It was the same system in every case.

Those who came to believe the AI cared rated it as more trustworthy, more empathetic, and more effective. Same machine, different story about the machine, different experience of the machine. Pataranutaporn summarized that it is, to some extent, “the AI of the beholder.”

But wait, there’s more. Two details matter for anyone thinking clinically.

First, the effect was stronger with the more sophisticated model than with a simple rule-based one. Better language did not correct the projective assumption. Instead, it gave the projection more to hold onto. That is the eloquence assumption in action.

Second, the researchers found a feedback loop. People who believed the AI was caring wrote to it more positively, the AI responded in kind, and the belief hardened over the course of the conversation. The user was not just interpreting the output. The user was producing it.

As with all studies, there are limits to acknowledge, or at least should be. The interactions were short, roughly half an hour, and the authors themselves say the long-term effects are unstudied. This was not a clinical population. What the study establishes is narrow but still sufficient to make a point: the empathy a person experiences from an AI is substantially a function of what that person brought into the room.

Naming What This Is

Therapy is not information transfer. It is a biologically embodied, socially embedded relation between two people, each with a history, in which one of them can be surprised by the other. The surprise, and a certain level of uncertainty, matter. A therapist notices what you left out, critically considers and possibly even rejects the story you came in rehearsing, and presents a separate point of view that you cannot write for.

A conversation with an AI is a real relationship, but the user is carrying both ends of it. You bring the frame. The model completes the frame. You read warmth into the completion. Then you respond to the warmth you put there. It feels like dialogue. It functions as a very articulate mirror.

Now, a mirror is not useless. People have journaled for centuries. The problem is thinking the mirror is a window.

Jared Moore and colleagues at Stanford tested what happens when that confusion meets real vulnerability. They put large language models and commercial therapy chatbots through scenarios drawn from clinical guidelines. The systems expressed stigma toward conditions like schizophrenia and alcohol dependence, and they responded inappropriately to delusional thinking and to suicidal ideation, in some cases going along with the delusion. The authors point to sycophancy as the likely reason. That is what a mirror does with a delusion. It agrees.

As an aside, if you’re looking at the people in your life and noting that they largely just mirror you, then all of the criticism lobbed at AI should be chucked right back at you. In fact, that’s where you should start, with yourself. Unfortunately, it’s a common practice these days to blame an external object, particularly if such can be laid at the feet of the modern boogey-man “capitalism,” that we engage with rather than acknowledge the many faults of our lived experience.

Anyway, on to the second problem.

The Second Problem: Not Knowing How to Use It

The assumptions detailed previously do not sustain themselves. They are fed by a separate and more ordinary failure: most people have never been shown how AI works or how to ask it anything properly. A large language model is, at its core, a system for predicting what text comes next. It was trained on a vast body of writing to get very good at continuing a sequence of words in a way that fits everything preceding it. Layers of further training shape it into something that behaves like a helpful conversational partner, but the engine is prediction, and the only thing it has to predict from is what you typed.

That makes the language used to create a prompt the entire clinical picture, at least where it concerns an attempt at therapy. This is not a request made to someone who already knows you. It is an inquiry made by someone who already thinks they know themselves.

Consider what happens with the kind of question people actually ask late at night:

Why do I always ruin my relationships?

There is no person in that sentence. No age, no history, no account of what “ruin” means or what “always” covers. The model has nothing specific to predict from, so it returns the most probable response to everyone who has ever written something like it. Attachment wounds. Fear of abandonment. Self-sabotage. A gentle suggestion to be kind to yourself.

It will feel uncannily accurate. Bertram Forer showed why in 1949, when he handed every student in his class the identical personality sketch and each rated it as a strikingly good description of themselves in particular. A statement general enough to fit anyone gets experienced as fitting me. The vague prompt produces the generic answer, and the generic answer is the perfect surface for projection. The user does the tailoring and credits the machine with insight. This is a digital form of horoscopes, made even more powerful because you don’t even have the “distance” being provided by the newspaper headline.

This is how the second problem feeds the first. The vague question gets an answer that seems to know you, and the experience confirms every assumption: it must be thinking, it must care, it must be right. The person never sees the answer change, so they never learn that it could have.

You know what would have been helpful? Giving it something to work with. Three elements do most of the work when it comes to quality prompting.

• Topic. Name the actual thing. Not “my relationships” but “in my last two relationships, I went silent for days after an argument, and both partners eventually ended things, citing that as a problem.”

• Role. Tell the system what position to respond from and what to avoid. “Respond as a critical reader of my account, not a supportive friend. Point out what I may be leaving out. Do not reassure me.”

• Context. Supply what a person in the room would already know: the relevant history, what you have already tried, what you are trying to decide, and what kind of response would be of use.

A prompt built that way constrains the prediction, so what comes back is about your situation rather than the average of everyone’s. It also forces you to do the articulating before the machine says a word, which is reflective work in its own right and leaves far less blank space for projection to fill. This isn’t fool-proof, but any time we slow down to more carefully and critically engage, there is a reduction in how problematic the outcome can become.

What Prompting Teaches

The larger benefit to learning how to use AI properly is not better answers. It is what the practice does to the assumptions.

Each element takes one of them apart from the inside. Assign a role, and you watch the voice change on command: supportive friend, skeptical reader, blunt supervisor, all from the same system within a minute. A voice you can assign is not some disembodied presence with a seemingly omniscient view of you. Supply context and you discover the machine knew nothing you did not hand it, and that leaving something out changes the answer. That is not what a mind that understood you would do. Tighten the topic, and you see the eloquent generalities fall away, which shows that the eloquence was never tracking the truth about you. It was tracking the prompt.

Prompting Best Practices (1)

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Do this for a week, and something can shift. You stop treating the response as a verdict and start treating it as a product of your own input, one you can revise, reject, or run again differently. The same question asked three ways returns three answers, and none of them arrives with authority.

Now, there is a trap here that any of us can walk into. Better prompts produce better answers, and better answers can feed the very beliefs this was meant to correct. The person who gets skilled at steering the machine may decide the machine has become wise, when all that happened is they became clearer. Skill alone does not protect anyone. What matters is what the skill is understood to be for.

So, prompting guidelines should keep two things front and center for the user.

The first is the centrality of their own input. The quality of what comes back is a measure of what went in. When the answer improves, the improvement belongs to the person who did the articulating, and the credit should go there rather than to the machine.

The second is that proper use makes a tool work better and nothing more than that. A sharpened chisel cuts cleaner. It does not design the cabinet, and it will never be the right thing for driving a nail. Learning to prompt well shows where the machine is useful and, just as much, where it stops. A user who holds onto both of those is handling a tool with limits. A user who forgets them is back to consulting a seeming repository of absolute accuracy, only now with a better technique.

A reminder here that therapy is not the use of one tool, however well handled. It is a relationship built on humility and mutual creativity. Humility, because neither person in the room knows in advance what the other will say or where the work will go, and the therapist has to be willing to be wrong. Mutual creativity, because what emerges is made by both people and belongs to neither alone. A machine that completes your prompt cannot be humble about you, because it has no stake in being wrong, and it cannot create with you, because everything it has to work from is what you supplied. The mirror does not become a window. The best that good prompting can do is make sure the user knows which one they are looking at.

The Strongest Objection

A moment, please, to make clear what I am not saying. I am not saying to never consult AI about one’s personal reflections, potential advice about difficulties, however personal they may be, or to engage it in exploring new ideas. We should consider the problems of access and outcomes. Therapy is often expensive, waitlists are long, and many people have no realistic path to a clinician. Meanwhile, research keeps finding that AI-written responses are rated highly. Dariya Ovsyannikova and colleagues reported that third-party evaluators judged AI responses as more compassionate than those from trained human crisis responders, and that the advantage shrank but held even when raters knew which was which. If people feel helped and nothing else is available, what is there to object to?

The access problem is real, and professional gatekeeping is not an answer to it. As well, given that I have a history of working with people clinically who had terrible experiences with previous therapists, the idea that a professional is an inherent good is a ridiculous and potentially quite harmful assumption.

Before I go down that rabbit hole, let’s look at what those studies actually measure. They measure how a piece of text is perceived. That is precisely the variable Pataranutaporn showed to be movable by a single sentence of framing. Finding that AI text is rated as compassionate does not contradict the argument here. It is the argument. The perception is real, and the perception is the reader’s.

Were we to eat our humble pie as a profession, the objection lands on the field harder than on the technology. If a chatbot looks like a plausible substitute for therapy, that is partly because therapy has spent decades describing itself as a set of techniques delivered to a recipient: psychoeducation, worksheets, reframes, and validating statements. Using any of these is not inherently wrong and can often be quite useful. The thing is, a language model can generate every one of those. What got lost is the relationship, the visceral humanity at the heart of all change and personal growth. Reduce a relational practice to transferable content, and something that produces content will appear to do the job. The machine did not devalue the relationship. We did that ourselves, and the machine took us at our word.

Where This Leaves Us

The claim is narrow. It is not that AI has no place in a person’s reflective life. It is not that the people using it are foolish; Weizenbaum’s secretary was not foolish. The claim here being made is that the difficulty sits in two distinct places, and that the second is the lever on the first. The assumptions are hard to argue anyone out of. Learning to use the tool properly, with attention on one’s own input and on what the tool cannot do, gives a person the direct experience that an argument can’t.

Fluency is not thoughtfulness. The warmth is yours. The voice is a crowd. And the less you give the system to work with, the more of what comes back is you, returned in better prose and mistaken for someone else.

What is at risk is not that people will talk to machines. It is that they will come to believe they have been heard when they have only been reflected, and stop looking for the kind of relation, humble and jointly made, in which another person can tell them something they did not already bring with them, and, even worse, perpetuate bad ideas by believing they are being supported by a super-intelligence.

Sources:

• Pataranutaporn, P., Liu, R., Finn, E., & Maes, P. (2023). Influencing human–AI interaction by priming beliefs about AI can increase perceived trustworthiness, empathy and effectiveness. Nature Machine Intelligence, 5, 1076–1086.

• Moore, J., Grabb, D., Agnew, W., Klyman, K., Chancellor, S., Ong, D. C., & Haber, N. (2025). Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers. FAccT ‘25.

• Ovsyannikova, D., et al. (2025). Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans. Communications Psychology.

• Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason. W. H. Freeman. Secretary account via the ELIZA Archaeology project.

• Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44, 118–123.

• Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. Basic Books.

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David

A feeling walks into the room, and, while I have no idea what the punch-line here is supposed to be, everyone stands at attention. That’s the whole problem. Feelings have amazing marketing. There are numerous films where the plot centers on emotions having their own voice, and we are inundated by the false story that feelings and thinking are somehow two separate processes, rather than woven threads of a biologically-based evaluation system.

This special attention we give to feelings, particularly in this age of the centrality of a person’s ‘lived experience,’ combined with the partisan quality that one’s relationship to feelings has taken — from ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ to ‘fuck your feelings’ to ‘my feelings matter’ — has only exacerbated our predilection for thinking the varieties of consciousness that we label as reason and emotion, are the most important thing about us, divorced from the natural order of our biology. This centrality of our experience has made the jump to — culturally, therapeutically, in the particular self-help dialect so many of my clients arrive speaking — deciding that the intensity of an emotion is evidence of its accuracy. Feel it strongly enough, and it must be true. Or, to bring attention to the central point of the current reflection: Feel unsafe enough, and you must be unsafe.

I want to take that apart, not only because it’s wrong, but because believing it is quietly making people more fragile, and more afraid, rather than resilient. Fragility feeds itself: treat the feeling as proof, and the next move is to avoid whatever triggered it — the conversation, the room, the person — shrinking the world a little more every time and handing the interpretive feeling label more authority the next time it shows up. What started as a single reaction becomes a habit of retreat, and the retreat becomes isolation, which then produces more of exactly the feeling it was meant to escape.

Here’s the plain point before I complicate it: feelings are not verdicts. They are not facts about the world, and they are not facts about you. They are, like thoughts, events that arise, carry information, and pass along. They are not, contrary to how this discussion usually goes, something that is or is capable of being suppressed or requiring obedience in any particular behavioral expression. The skill to apply is learning to hold them long enough to ask questions before engaging in the actions that will express them.

What Happens in the Second Before You Believe It

Lets start with the body, because that’s where the myth of emotional infallibility gets its authority. In 2007, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA ran people through an fMRI scanner while showing them photographs of faces twisted into fear or anger. One condition asked subjects to simply look. Another asked them to pick the word that named what they were seeing — “angry,” “afraid” — and attach it to the image.

Labeling the emotion, compared to just absorbing the image, was seen to have calmed the amygdala and other limbic regions down, while lighting up one specific region: the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, an area tied to symbolic, top-down processing of emotional information. The two effects moved together — the more that word-using region was activated, the quieter the alarm circuitry became.

This neurological relationship is key to understanding the findings here. As Reisberg notes: “The amygdala is also important for detecting positive stimuli—indicators of safety or available rewards.” (Reisberg, Daniel. Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind (p. 92)). Assessment is never a single-region affair, but a whole-body — and by this is meant the brain as well — process.

Naming the feeling didn’t erase it. It didn’t require the subject to decide the feeling was wrong, unjustified, or shameful. It just interrupted the automatic hand-off from raw, pre-conscious, appraisal to full-bodied reaction. Joseph LeDoux has spent considerable time mapping the “low road” that lets a threat cue bypass deliberate cognition entirely, because a genuine predator doesn’t wait for you to finish thinking. This is why threat identification needs to be fast, our survival in the original evolutionary environment required it. But a threat-detection system built for speed is, by definition, a system built to be wrong sometimes. Fast and accurate are different design goals, and the amygdala was built for the first. What Lieberman’s study shows is that the ancient circuitry issuing the verdict is not the only voice in the room — and a slower, symbolic, word-using part of you can turn its volume down without turning its message off.

The Feeling Is Data. It Is Not the Conclusion.

I want to be careful, because there’s a lazy version of this argument that goes to the absurd conclusion of “just don’t feel things.” It’s often more positively put forward by those who think of themselves as purely “rational” creatures, typically to distance themselves from someone they don’t agree with, or to misogynistically dismiss the entirety of the female sex. Let me be clear: that version is both cruel and clinically illiterate. Feelings are not noise to be filtered out. Feelings, or, better, feeling states, are one input among several, arriving from a system optimized for speed over precision. Treating any particular feeling state, given an emotional label, as the final input — the one that gets to skip deliberation and go straight to the conclusion — is as the error. This is the same error that the person dismissing feelings is making, except that they amusingly and to the same degree of clinical illiteracy, are declaring a conscious thought as automatically correct because they have it.

Steven Hayes and colleagues built an entire clinical model around the distinction between mental data points, whether feelings or thoughts, and conclusions. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) names the failure “cognitive fusion” — the collapse of the space between having a thought or feeling and being fused to it, so that, for example, “I feel unsafe” stops being an observation and becomes an identity, a fact, a closed loop. The intervention Hayes proposes isn’t argumentation. You don’t out-debate a feeling. Rather, it’s defusion: noticing the feeling as a feeling — I am having the sensation of unsafety rather than I am unsafe — which is functionally the same move Lieberman’s subjects were making when they reached for a word instead of just absorbing the image. Naming is not the same as agreeing. That gap between the two is where the active space of flexibility lives. Just as we can have fun with finding shapes in clouds, it doesn’t mean there’s a real elephant there. We have connected disparate pieces to project a whole, and where we go awry is when we mistake the conclusion as inevitable and singular.

Flexibility, not calm, is the actual target. To live a mentally healthy life is not to have distress be absent, any more than training for a sport or an event means you won’t feel discomfort. A person who has trained themselves to interrogate a feeling — where did this come from, what is it actually telling me, has this exact shape of alarm been wrong before — is not someone who feels less. They’re someone who no longer lets a single, however strongly “felt,” interpretation override the variety of possibility in the next moment, day, or life.

The Client Who Left Before I Could Say Anything

A few years ago, I was working with a man — a name doesn’t matter as this is a meshing of multiple stories — who worked in a warehouse and had spent two decades certain that any flicker of anger meant he was becoming his father. He’d feel his jaw tighten in a disagreement with a coworker, and the interpretation arrived instantaneously: it’s happening again, I am him, get out. He’d leave the room. Sometimes he’d leave the shift. The feeling wasn’t wrong to have — how his father expressed his anger had genuinely hurt him, and his nervous system had every reason to be alert to the shape of it. What was wrong was the next step, the one that happened so fast it didn’t feel like a step at all: treating the jaw-tightening as proof of an identity, rather than as one data point that needed a second look before he acted on it.

As with all the clients I work with on their relationship to anger, we didn’t work on eliminating the anger. We worked on the consequences. Notice the jaw. Name it — tension, not fury. Ask what’s actually in front of you right now, this conversation, this coworker, not the one from thirty years ago. Slow, undramatic, repeated work. By the end, he wasn’t calmer, not exactly. Rather, he was more willing to stay in the room long enough to find out whether the alarm was pointing at something real. That willingness — not the absence of the jolt, but the presence of the resiliency — is what changed his life.

The Steelman: Isn’t This Just Another Way to Dismiss Yourself?

An objection can rise here concerning “don’t automatically believe your feelings,” where it can sound like the invalidating message so many people have received from a parent, a partner, a church — you’re too sensitive, calm down, it’s not that big a deal? There’s a risk of handing people a sophisticated-sounding excuse to behaviorally suppress, minimize, or spiritually bypass legitimate distress. Emotional invalidation can definitely be harmful. I’m not interested in giving it a shiny new intellectual cover with neuroscience.

The distinction is where the interrogation is aimed. Invalidation says your feeling is wrong, stop having it. Defusion says your feeling is real, now let’s find out what it’s actually telling you before we let it drive. One shuts the inquiry down before it starts; the other opens it. A person practicing this well doesn’t arrive at “I shouldn’t feel scared.” They arrive at “I feel scared — is that because something here is actually dangerous, or because this situation is experienced as an echo of an old one?” Sometimes the honest answer is yes, this is dangerous, leave. The point was never to override the feeling. It was to stop being ruled by it before you’d asked the question.

Safety Was Never the Absence of Hurt

Now we arrive at what I actually think safety means — and it’s not a fantasy of the absence of distress. Far too often, typically by people who are trying to sell us on the idea that obedience to authority or subjection to a rigid ideology, we take on the idea that a safe life is a life with the hurt filtered out: no jolt of shame, no flash of fear, no unwanted feeling allowed to land. The thing is, that version of safety is not just unavailable, it’s a bad target even in principle, because it defines the entire project as controlling an environment you don’t actually have the power to effect at the scale required.

The alternative is older and far more durable: safety as the capacity to be disturbed and still function. To have the feeling, hold it, ask it a question, and choose your next move instead of having the move chosen for you by a circuit built for speed thirty million years before anyone needed to survive a disagreement with a coworker. That’s resilience. Not an absence of feeling, but the presence of deliberateness. It doesn’t require the storm to pass you by. It asks that you still be standing, still deciding, when it does.

A passing thought or feeling, which is what they always are, is allowed to be loud. It is not allowed to be the director, no matter how “strong” it is felt to be. That’s the discipline leading to a mentally healthy life — not silence, not suppression, just the half-second of daylight between the feeling and the verdict, held open on purpose, every time. The result is a flexibility to not be tossed about by every wind of consciousness, and instead step into the best version of who you want to be.

Sources:

Matthew D. Lieberman, Naomi I. Eisenberger, Molly J. Crockett, Sabrina M. Tom, Jennifer H. Pfeifer, and Baldwin M. Way, “Putting Feelings Into Words,”Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 421–428.

Steven C. Hayes, Jason B. Luoma, Frank W. Bond, Akihiko Masuda, and Jason Lillis, “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, Processes and Outcomes,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 44, no. 1 (2006): 1–25.

Joseph LeDoux’s work on the amygdala’s rapid, low-road threat-appraisal pathway is discussed throughout The Emotional Brain (Simon & Schuster, 1996).

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David

We are as human beings exceptionally good at creating stories or, to use the modern, far too common vernacular, narratives. Unfortunately for our ability to tell just-so stories, we don’t actually have access to other people’s so-called inner world. We are not mind-readers, however much someone selling their hocus pocus would have you believe. This is true regardless of how strongly you feel you are right, how loudly you yell, or how traumatic you make your story. You simply do not have access to another person’s conscious life outside of the verbiage they share. Now, that doesn’t mean a person can’t be lying to you, but that’s a judgment in search of evidence to support it, and even if you find seemingly incontrovertible evidence that the story told is nonsense, that still doesn’t give you access to that person’s thoughts in any way approaching magic.

This fundamental part of human relationship building is why dialogue is so important and why lying is, in my estimation, the foundational ethical error for all the world’s ills. Lying is about actively having another person not have access to reality as you, and by extension, the rest of humanity does. Despite the ridiculous overuse of the term “gaslighting,” there’s a reason the term has spread so far, because it directs attention to how our frameworks, including beliefs, about reality are foundational to how we make the best decisions we can. To lie is to deny that possibility to another.

Now, lying is an active action, and gaslighting is an active pattern of behavior. Despite the active nature of those things, they are built on a foundation of conscious behavior that is inherently deceptive. Because we don’t have access to other people’s conscious lives, we therefore create entire worlds in our own, of which other people are characters. The degree to which we unquestioningly agree with those constructs is the degree to which our lives are filled with an increasing degree of needless suffering.

When it comes to relationships, and the errors we make in blindly believing the ideas we have about another’s actions, a great deal of emotional pain comes from the need to explain silence. Keeping in mind the framing so far described, the story you tell yourself about someone’s silence is rarely about them. It’s about the story, or “understanding,” you created and automatically agreed with, that helped you avoid the feeling you couldn’t afford to experience while waiting for an answer from the other. Most of what gets called “reading between the lines” or “mind reading” is actually the body writing its own lines first, as heightened arousal, and handing them to the mind to defend, experienced as anxiety.

Naming the Pattern

Here’s the shape it often takes. Someone doesn’t text back as quickly as expected, or answers a question a little flatly, or cancels plans without much explanation. The ambiguity itself is uncomfortable, as any level of uncertainty generally is, being as uncertainty is the bedrock for the interpretation of anxiety. And rather than sit inside that static long enough to ask a simple clarifying question, the mind fills the gap with a fully formed narrative: they’re pulling away, they’re annoyed with me, I did something wrong. The story arrives fast, feels certain, and is rarely checked against the person who could actually confirm or deny it.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has a name for the maneuver underneath this: experiential avoidance. The story, arriving as it does with a fervently strong belief in its accuracy, isn’t really about predicting the other person accurately. It’s a way of resolving an intolerable present-moment sensation — the not-knowing — by converting it into something that makes sense, even if what’s captured is worse than the absence of information. A confirmed story, however painful, feels more bearable than an unconfirmed body.

What the Agitation Is Actually Doing

This is where predictive processing becomes so important for humbly acknowledging the inevitable errors we make in our judgments, because it explains why the story shows up so fast and feels so convincing. Daniel Villiger’s account of psychopathology through this framework describes the brain as constantly minimizing the gap between what it predicted and what it’s sensing — and under ambiguous conditions, the nervous system doesn’t tolerate uncertainty well. It resolves prediction error by generating the highest-precision guess available, which is usually whatever story matches the oldest, most rehearsed one in personal history. If your history has taught you that people leave, “they’re pulling away” isn’t a wild guess. It’s the model doing exactly what a predictive system is built to do: minimize uncertainty as fast as possible, using whatever inference is quickest to reach.

The bodily agitation, experientially labelled as anxiety, isn’t noise in this scenario. It’s the signal that a prediction error is live — that something in the environment doesn’t yet match the internal model, and the system is under pressure to resolve it one way or another. Elizabeth Li and colleagues’ integration of predictive processing with control-mastery theory adds a piece to the experiential puzzle: people don’t just passively receive these signals; they unconsciously test them. Their whole account of patient testing describes exactly the move that experiential avoidance short-circuits — putting the ambiguous situation in front of another person and seeing whether reality confirms or disconfirms the prediction. Making up the story and never asking is a quiet test of self-confirmation. It’s always easier to confirm a belief when the test for its accuracy never leaves the lab of your own thinking. The prediction gets to keep its precision, unchallenged, and therefore generates the one thing that the brain as a biological system is after: consistency.

The Story Was a Construct, Not a Fact

George Kelly’s psychological theory helps us see this from a different angle. We form cognitive connections, or constructs, between what we believe we know and an imagined future to direct our behavior towards. A construct isn’t a belief about a discrete fact; it’s a framework a person uses to make their entire relational world legible — “people who go quiet are leaving” functions like a hypothesis, and how we go about testing it will determine whether we continue to act on it. Testing the building blocks of our reality perception is not without distress. David Winter’s recent accounting of Personal Construct Psychology makes the point directly: revising a construct threatens the coherence of an entire anticipatory system, which is exactly why it resists casual correction.

Michael Mahoney’s distinction between rationalist and constructivist therapies is useful here, too. The rationalist tradition, epitomized by REBT and its philosophical offshoot Logic-Based Therapy, treats the content of a thought as the thing to dispute. The constructivist tradition treats the construct as inseparable from the identity organizing it. You don’t talk someone out of “people leave me.” You give them a lived, embodied counter-experience precise enough to update it, which is a different kind of practice than winning an argument. Doing so is what Mari Aguilera and colleagues found when Personal Construct Therapy, working directly with identity and self-construal, matched Cognitive Behavioral Therapy’s outcomes for depressed women with fibromyalgia. Working with the construct, not just the content, got the same result through a completely different mechanism, and one that didn’t involve the neurological absurdity of “replacing” one’s thoughts.

Discomfort as Information, Not Obstacle

This is the personal pivot ACT offers, though it’s hard to put into practice: the discomfort isn’t the problem to be managed away before real living can resume. It’s quite often the most direct signal available about what matters. You don’t feel your stomach drop over a partner’s flat tone unless the relationship itself has personal emotional weight for you. The agitation is proportional to the degree of relational importance, embodying the values of closeness, honesty, and being known accurately by someone whose opinion matters to you. Avoiding the discomfort by resolving it into a story that you don’t challenge doesn’t just cost you accuracy. It costs you the information that the discomfort was carrying about what you actually care about.

Values-guided action, in the ACT sense, means letting that information direct the next move instead of the avoidance directing it. If the sensation is there because connection matters, the values-consistent response is to move toward clarification — to ask the plain, unglamorous question — precisely because it’s uncomfortable, not despite it. ACT, paired with what predictive processing and PCP say about how constructs actually form and hold, wants you to notice the sensation, name what it’s protecting, and let the value underneath it determine what you do next. Let the feeling be a guide to support the value that matters, not a place to wallow in.

A Relationship That Ended Over a Story Nobody Checked

I worked with a client (actually, multiple, as this is a common issue, and hence the following story is a composite) whose closest friendship dissolved almost entirely inside their own head. The friend had started responding to messages more slowly over a few weeks. No single incident seemed to have inspired it. My client noticed the delay every time, felt a specific tightness show up in their chest each time they saw the “delivered” notification with no reply, and by the second week had constructed a complete account: the friend had grown tired of them, was probably talking to mutual friends about it, and was looking for a way to leave them behind. None of this was said aloud. None of it was asked about. Instead, my client began pulling back preemptively — shorter replies, less initiation, a kind of controlled retreat designed to get ahead of a rejection that, as far as anyone could verify, hadn’t actually happened yet.

The friendship ended not because the friend withdrew, but because my client did, in response to a story built entirely from an ambiguous silence and an unexamined bodily reaction. When we went back through it in session, the chest-tightness was the most honest data point in the whole account — more honest than the story. It was accurate about the stakes: this friendship mattered enough that its possible loss registered physically. It was not accurate and was never tested, as evidence about what the friend was actually doing. Had my client been able to name the sensation as agitation-about-a-value under perceived threat rather than proof-of-a-conclusion, the available move was obvious in hindsight: ask directly, tolerate the discomfort of possibly hearing something hard, and let the actual answer — not the fastest, cheapest prediction — determine what came next. Clarifying language, offered from a stated shared value (”this friendship matters to me, and I noticed a shift, is everything okay between us?”), was available the entire time. The construct never got tested. The relationship absorbed the cost of a prediction error that was never allowed to be resolved against reality.

Where This Isn’t a License for Every Impulse

It’s important to be careful about not taking this too far, because “trust the discomfort” can curdle into its own kind of problem. Not every story that accompanies a physiological signal is one that is wholly false. This is why testing is appropriate through dialogue. Environmental changes, sleep deprivation, and poor eating can produce the identical bodily agitation being described here, and sometimes the story that is made to interpret it is false, but sometimes it’s your body/brain system signaling there’s something there to be wary of. The connection between feeling and narrative is one in constant need of reflective critical awareness. It’s a practice, not a destination. It’s interoceptive (body awareness) discrimination: learning to tell the difference between agitation that’s signaling “this matters, go find out” and agitation that’s signaling “you’re depleted, and everything feels like a threat right now.” Learning to discriminate is exactly the kind of work a good therapeutic relationship — one that challenges as much as it affirms — is suited to build.

What Actually Has to Change

The alternative to arguing yourself out of a bad prediction was never a better argument. It was staying inside the discomfort long enough to find out what it was actually protecting, and then acting from that — asking the question, naming the value, risking the answer — instead of resolving the ambiguity privately and calling the unchallenged resolution a fact. The agitation was never the principal obstacle to the relationship. The refusal to name what’s important and challenge the ready-made story, despite having to wade through discomfort, was.

Sources:

Daniel Villiger, “An Integrative Model of Psychotherapeutic Interventions Based on a Predictive Processing Framework”, Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy (2024)

Elizabeth Li et al., “Predict to Control, Test to Master: Integrating Predictive Processing and Control–Mastery Theory in Understanding How Psychotherapy Works”, Journal of Psychotherapy Integration (2025)

David A. Winter, “Personal Construct Psychology – Still Going Strong at 70?”, Journal of Constructivist Psychology (2026)

Michael J. Mahoney and William J. Lyddon, “Recent Developments in Cognitive Approaches to Counseling and Psychotherapy”, The Counseling Psychologist (1988)

Mari Aguilera et al., “Cognitive-Behavioral and Personal Construct Therapies for Depression in Women with Fibromyalgia: A Randomized Controlled Trial”

International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology (2022); Elliot D. Cohen et al., “A Randomized, Controlled, Preliminary Study to Assess the Efficacy of Logic-Based Therapy in Reducing Anxiety and/or Depression in Family Caregivers”

Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (2023); Ailish M. King et al., “A systematic review of the nature and efficacy of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy interventions”, PLOS ONE(2024).

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David

Most criticism of AI is not actually about quality. This seems to be contradicted by the legion of social media posts about “AI-slop,” but such a pejorative is increasingly becoming a way to dismiss people and their creative capacity, rather than any legitimate identification. Just this week, I saw a photographer friend of mine defend their work because people were calling it AI, when really it was about the skills of camera angles, lighting, and the sheer enormity of the ignorance of how, yes, the Badlands of South Dakota do in fact have greenery.

It is about authorship. That distinction matters more than the AI debate usually admits, not least because people generally have a constantly moving and typically based-in-ignorance rubric in judging what AI (often undefined as well) is and what is a program that people have been using for years for creative output like Photoshop and various writing grammar helpers.

Nowhere is this distinction more visible than in a small, uncomfortable body of research on therapists’ rating psychological advice.

The Finding that Blindsided

In 2025, a research team in Sweden ran a blinded study that should disturb anyone confident about any unique quality inherent to therapeutic language. Ludwig Franke Föyen and colleagues took real advice-column questions from a Swedish national newspaper, along with the expert responses that had actually been published, and generated matched AI responses to the same questions. They then recruited licensed psychologists, psychotherapists, and physicians and asked them to rate the responses on quality and empathy, without being told which was which.

The clinicians could not reliably tell the difference. Worse, for anyone invested in the supposed inherent quality of human clinical warmth, the AI-generated responses were rated significantly higher on emotional and motivational empathy than the expert-written ones, and statistically comparable on scientific quality and cognitive empathy. This was not a fluke result. A pooled review by Alastair Howcroft and colleagues, synthesizing fifteen studies comparing chatbot and healthcare-professional empathy, found AI rated as significantly more empathic in thirteen of them — an advantage roughly equivalent to two points on a ten-point scale. A widely cited 2023 study of the r/AskDocs subreddit found licensed clinicians preferring chatbot answers over physician answers 78.6% of the time.

But wait, there’s more. The researchers didn’t just ask clinicians to rate blind responses. They also manipulated perceived authorship, telling some raters a response came from an expert when it hadn’t, or vice versa. The effect was large. Believing a response had been written by a human expert raised its ratings substantially — enough to swing the study’s core comparison. This was true regardless of who had actually written it. The label did the work that the words themselves hadn’t earned.

Let’s be clear: expert clinicians, trained to detect empathic attunement (the basis for rapport-building) for a living, could be induced to rate a paragraph as more caring by being told a human wrote it, independent of anything in the paragraph itself. Authorship became the signal to override expertise.

Naming What This Is

Now, this is not a story about AI being secretly wonderful at therapy. It’s a story about what the word “human” is doing when clinicians, and so many others, reach for it as a quality determinant rather than a description. That distinction may be getting lost, so let’s try being as exact as possible: quality is a property of the artifact, highlighting its coherence, precision, and responsiveness to what was actually said. Authorship is a fact about origin. When origin starts functioning as a substitute for quality even after the artifact has been blind-tested and found equal or better, something other than quality assessment is happening. Let’s call a spade a spade: what’s happening is a tax levied on the artifact for not having the right kind of author, paid in the currency of a rating scale, with quality being left behind. Put in the vernacular of the social critic, this is virtue-signaling at its finest, where declaring oneself in alignment with a socially-constrained ethical prerogative is more important than providing a qualitatively better judgment.

Despite my rhetoric, I don’t honestly think this bias is without some legitimacy. A great deal of what makes human clinical relationships valuable, like being known over time, is real and is not measured by a single vignette rating. The Swedish study, like most other current similar studies, tested isolated written responses, not a sustained relationship. That’s a limitation, and I’m not dismissing it. But notice what the bias is not: it is not a claim about relationship, continuity, or embodiment. It’s a preference for the response believed to be human, holding the actual content (including its helpfulness and possibly even accuracy) of the response as less important. That’s a narrower and stranger thing than “human relationship matters,” and it’s worth being honest about rather than ignoring it by throwing it under the bus of a broader self-serving ethical claim.

The Applause Line

I watched this same mechanism play out live a few weeks ago. I was sitting through a presentation where the presenter opened by announcing — with visible pride — that they hadn’t used AI anywhere in building their slides. The room applauded as if the person had just declared the cure for cancer. With cheers, before a single slide of content had been evaluated on its own terms.

The deck that followed was bad. Not bad in an interesting or debatable way, but bad in the textbook sense that guidelines exist to prevent. Slides were dense with paragraphs of unreadable body text. The backgrounds were busy templates that fought with the text sitting on top of them. Images were dropped in because they were decorative, not because they clarified anything, and several actively pulled attention away from the point being made. The examples cited were often years out of date, and the reasoning connecting slide to slide had gaps that should have been caught in a rough draft. By any standard, a presentation-design course would apply — text load, visual hierarchy, signal-to-noise, currency of the evidence — it failed.

You know what would have been helpful? The tool that would have addressed many of the problems and offered directions for addressing them? AI. But the room had already applauded. Not as a response to the content, it couldn’t have been, since the content hadn’t been seen yet. It was a response to the performative statement: I made this without AI. That announcement did the same work in that room that “written by a human expert” did in the Karolinska raters’ heads — it pre-loaded the evaluation before the evaluation had anything to evaluate. The only difference is that the therapists in the study were at least judging real content and getting the rating wrong. The conference audience applauded, and therefore set up an affirmative judgment about the content, before the content existed for them at all.

I don’t think anyone in that room actually believed the deck was good. It’s not as if they could actually read any of it on the stage anyway. I think most of them didn’t consciously register that it was bad, because the applause had already closed the question the way all virtue-signaling closes critical inquiry: by converting “did not use AI” into a virtue that stands on its own, independent of whether the resulting artifact does its job. That’s the authorship tax again, just moved out of the lab and into a conference room, and it indicates the same issue the clinicians inadvertently displayed: that preloading social solidarity will undermine objectivity, even if it means being poorer because of it. There was just a slide deck, doing its job badly, applauded for the one thing that had nothing to do with whether it worked.

The Critique that Supports Mediocrity

Here is where I think the AI-critical conversations go wrong. The standard move is to treat any evidence that AI output is rated well as evidence that the rating instrument is broken, that raters were fooled, that empathy “isn’t really” what’s being measured, or that the study can’t capture what matters. Sometimes those are legitimate methodological points. Often, they function as an escape hatch: a way of preserving the conclusion that human work (again, lacking in nuance since a definitive quality of being human is the use of tools, which means human work should always include an asterisk) is intrinsically better, without doing the harder work of showing it on the actual dimension being tested.

This is where criticism of AI devolves into a defense of mediocrity. Not because AI is categorically superior — as saying so would break a fundamental therapeutic tool for noting cognitive errors, namely black/white thinking — but because the reasoning pattern stops being about output and starts being about protecting the person from disconfirming evidence. If a clinician’s response is judged less empathic than a language model’s on a task both were asked to do, the honest response is to sit with that, not to shoot the messenger and declare what feels better to be the winner. A profession that only accepts evaluations it passes isn’t holding a quality standard; it’s simply declaring itself above criticism. While admittedly, I think this is often occurring throughout the field of psychology, particularly therapeutic psychology, it doesn’t make the practice any less ethically vacuous.

I want to be careful here, because often people will take this criticism and slide into “well then AI should just replace therapists,” which is not only not what I’m saying, but isn’t supported by the data anyway. In-the-moment empathy ratings and therapeutic outcomes are not the same measurement, and a chatbot’s higher score on a single written exchange says nothing about whether it can competently engage in confrontation, tolerate a client’s anger at it, or hold a treatment plan together across months of relapse and repair. Psychology Today has an article that adds further caution: AI empathy may be more template-driven, where human responses, even when rated as “less empathic” in aggregate, carry more linguistic diversity. This points to how a single-point measurement may capture one rating, but long-term relationship-building would capture a different one. These are legit limits on what the empathy studies lead to, though they’re also a cautionary story of what incremental improvements of AI could accomplish. None of the limits, though, is an approval for the authorship tax. They’re arguments for better measurement, not arguments for rating the same words higher once you’re told a human wrote them.

What Mediocrity Actually Costs

I work with many who have been burned by poor therapy, whose personal and relational lives have been led astray by incredibly poor interventions under the guise of expertise, and often given self-righteous weight by socio-political activist ideologies that pre-judge the client into categories for easy dismissal. Much of my writing is also critical of a therapeutic establishment that has become the secular equivalent of a priesthood, and has quite quickly become the go-to space for a society that has found itself unable to deal with adversity, form nuanced friendships, or accept that reality isn’t theirs to shape in any way they want. I have also sat with clients who received technically correct but empathically hollow care from human clinicians, and I’ve watched colleagues produce boilerplate reassurance dressed in a caring tone because caring tone was all they were trained to do. The authorship bias isn’t hypothetical for me. It’s the same mechanism that lets a mediocre human intervention pass because it came from a human, while a genuinely well-constructed piece of psychoeducation gets dismissed because it is believed to have come from a machine.

If empathy ratings can be moved by a label, then “I can tell the difference” is not a reliable clinical skill, nor is it a reliable tool for judgment by anyone else. It is, instead, a belief that answers a question that isn’t even being asked, by faking an answer to one that is. The professionally responsible response to research findings that indicate a potential problem in the field is not defensiveness, but empathically critical reflection.

Where this Leaves Us

None of this is a simple case for AI-delivered therapy, certainly in any expansive form currently. Empathy ratings on isolated vignettes settle nothing about relationship, safety, or long-term care. The head researcher himself, in commenting on his own findings, has been explicit that AI shouldn’t replace human relationships or professional care, partly because of exactly the safety failures that make consumer chatbots dangerous in a genuine crisis. What it is a case for is separating two questions that keep getting collapsed into one: is this good, and who made it? The Swedish clinicians in this study were good at their jobs and still couldn’t keep those two questions apart when the label was switched on them. That’s not an indictment of therapists. It’s a demonstration that authorship bias operates below the level of professional training, and that a critique of AI built on that bias, instead of on the actual, defensible limits of what these studies measure, isn’t defending humanistic care. It’s defending the label. And the mediocrity that results doesn’t help those who need quality care.

Sources:

Franke Föyen, L., Zapel, E., Lekander, M., Hedman-Lagerlöf, E., & Lindsäter, E. (2025). Artificial intelligence vs. human expert: Licensed mental health clinicians’ blinded evaluation of AI-generated and expert psychological advice on quality, empathy, and perceived authorship. Internet Interventions, 41, 100841.

Additional context drawn from the fabulous writing of Charlotte Blease and Psychology Today’s “The Shadow Artificial Third.”

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David

Engaging with the Bible often feels like navigating a complex maze of stories and interpretations, especially for women. In this conversation, we dive into a conversation with Karis Bukowski and David Fitzgerald about their collaborative work to retell biblical narratives from the perspectives of several women’s stories. These are characters that many are well aware of, but Karis and David bring them to life in a broader, culturally informed, and at times humorous way, to provide a more appreciative and critical inquiry into just what it meant to be a woman of the Bible.

Karis and David’s exploration of women in the Bible invites readers to rethink not just the stories they know but the narratives that shape their understanding of gender, power, and faith. As the conversation shows, and modern social conversation continues to indicate, it’s crucial to recognize the voices and perspectives that have been historically marginalized.

Check out the full episode. The stories we tell matter.

The Genesis of Their Collaboration

Karis and David’s journey began at BAHACon, a conference where speakers and attendees mingle freely, fostering an environment of open dialogue that drew them together. Their discussion, ignited by the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs, centered on the realization that many of the Biblical narratives often cast women in a negative, or at least dismissive, light. Karis, who was raised Lutheran but lost her faith early on, and David, well-versed in Biblical history, found common ground in their desire to reshape these narratives.

“We wanted to tell the story, but we wanted to make one little tweak. We wanted to tell it from the woman’s point of view. That one little tweak changes everything.” — David Fitzgerald

Retelling the Stories

Their book, “Clearly Written By Boys,” features the stories of prominent biblical women such as Eve, Jezebel, and Ruth, but with a significant shift in perspective. By presenting these narratives through the perspectives of the women themselves, they highlight the often-overlooked complexities and injustices faced by these characters.

Karis reflects on their approach, stating, “Every part that we did had new insights because we were looking deeper and from a different angle.” The goal is not just to retell the stories but to challenge the context in which they have been traditionally understood.

The duo’s writing style is infused with humor, making the book not only informative but also enjoyable. Karis notes that writing with David brought a lightness to the serious subject matter, making their exploration of biblical stories feel accessible and engaging.

A Call to Action

As the conversation unfolds, they express concern about the current societal trends that echo the patriarchal structures present in biblical times. They advocate for a broader understanding of these narratives to empower women today.

“What we are trying to say is, look, this is your religion. This is where it came from. It may not be that now. You may practice it better...” — David Fitzgerald

Their work is a call to examine the roots of beliefs and how they shape modern society. We should be celebrating the progress much of humanity has made by invoking the principles of humanism, and not disregarding the perspectives, experiences, and rights of not only 50% of the population, but half of who we are as human beings.

Related Reading

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David

There are a great many fictions we carry about the nature of self. These fictions are distortions of how our embodied and embedded natural minds interact as a part of, but never apart from, the ongoing natural systems we engage with. Our stories of who and what we are matter because they set the stage for the actions we find possible, and therefore are inevitably placing limits on how our lives are lived. This isn’t to say that limits can be removed; we are still and always will be finite creatures, but it’s truly remarkable what we’re capable of doing when we see that all our stories are, while not fake, at least artificial and not always to be taken seriously.

The following are four articles that go into several of those distortions.

The first is the idea that there’s some authentic self you’re trying to display, when the reality is that you’re always you, and every social context will draw out variations of what that means. The important thing is to be aware of what’s being pulled on.

This next article is concerned with the distortion of a singular you arising from the disparate labels, identities, and social connections that you’re embedded within. It’s an issue of flexibility, and much like the trap of authenticity, attempting to find the singular you only gets you trapped when adversity finds you.

Speaking of flexibility, here we have the third in a series of articles about the psychological theory I operate from, what I often refer to as Relational-ACT. Once we acknowledge that who we are is a perspective embedded in a social context, behavior becomes a means of expressing what matters to us, no matter the situation. We may not always act exactly the same way in support of our values, but that doesn’t mean we have ceased to care about them.

Lastly, flexibility often leads to an increase in uncertainty and, therefore, stress, as behavior is seen more as a tool for expressing personal meaning instead of declarations of what must be from a position of authority. This is one reason why rigidity, dogmatism, and fundamentalist ideologies are so enticing: they are a bulwark against the complexity of reality by providing ready-made answers. Essentially, they’re the hotpockets of worldviews, requiring no skill to make and satisfying only if you don’t question what you’re putting in you.

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David

“Perhaps the most damaging dualism for psychology is the Cartesian mind/body split. Dewey saw this as deeply embedded in Western culture since the advent of Pauline Christianity. It has resulted in misleading questions such as: do cognitions cause behavior, or are they merely epiphenomena?”

(from The Wiley Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology)

Imagine with me for a moment a group of cheetahs having a beer as they gaze out across an African savannah, looking down upon the smaller animals scurrying here and there. Were they of a species capable of doing so, their conversation may very well be one where they share the difficulties of the day amongst their speedy feline compatriots.

“Lost another antelope today. Is it just me or have those things gotten faster?” asks Fred (because a cheetah named such definitely makes sense).

“Not just you. I think they’re likely juicing on something,” responds George.

“Really guys?” Benny asks, reaching down to grab a second haunch of antelope that he’d caught. “Have you tried just thinking you’re faster?”

Regardless of whatever names you give your wild animals, and the absurdity of any conversation they’re likely to get up to were they evolutionarily constrained to develop a surplue of neurons and a greater degree of social cohesion that required short-hand communication to convey increasingly complex concepts, namely, language, it stands to reason that they’d likely focus on the thing that set them apart from the other animals. It would define them and, based on that central identifying characteristic, be the cause of both their successes and a focus when addressing their failures. For the cheetah, it’s their speed. For us, it’s our amusing uninvited guest we call our consciousness.

For us, though, conscious experience isn’t enough to satisfy our hubris. Despite the uncertainty about its exact nature and the wonder of exploring it, we have projected a false dividing line for ourselves between the supposed competing forces of emotion and reason. This has done us no favors in helping us understand ourselves better, but it does serve the social benefit of providing an easy way to declare oneself better than another by referring to another as “emotional” (ridiculously often conflated with a certain supposedly “softer” sex and therefore expanding the process of negatively othering an entire half of the human species). This is, of course, juxtaposed with the “hardness” (seriously, the euphemisms write themselves) of reason as a “rigid” system of rules for informational discovery.

Because of this internal Maginot Line we’ve created, we often find ourselves attempting to hide behind the fortifications of reason to avoid the distressing internal environment we experience in life, only to be constantly reminded that discomfort simply finds a way around them. Not to be deterred, since we can’t seem to give up the idea that evolution stopped at the neck and reason somehow allows us to transcend the material constraints of biology and its extensions, various therapies have been created to help us double down on the ego-inflating notion that if we just set up our logical syllogisms better, everything will go along.

Here enters Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), itself an iteration of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), and, as inspiration for this article, Logic-Based Therapy (LBT). Of the three, REBT is likely the most honest when it comes to acronyms, as it declares its foundational philosophical assumption: reason and emotion are separate, and emotion follows from reason.

Elliott Cohen describes LBT as a more philosophically focused extension of REBT, having collaborated with Albert Ellis, the creator of REBT, he claims that our conscious interpretations, not the events themselves, produce the distress in our lives. As an example, a practical syllogism resulting in distress would be: If I’m rejected by friends, then I’m a reject; I have been rejected by friends; therefore I’m a reject. Cohen notes that treatment involves identifying one of 11 “Cardinal Fallacies” that LBT has isolated as creating our personal pathologies, refuting the original syllogism through logic, adopting a supporting philosophy to counter it, and then engaging in new behavior. Emotional distress, according to LBT, is essentially a logical error that can be corrected through reasoning and philosophical reading.

A Problem of Biology

Logic skills and broader critical, reflective reasoning skills are beneficial parts of our lives, not because they supersede or somehow remove our emotional lives, but because of their utility in providing social justification for our activities. We are, using these skills, engaged in some form of argumentation, selecting data that fits our preconscious understanding, and then offering up, to varying levels of credibility, a rationale for why we are correct in one or another form of behavior, from the merely verbal articulation of a worldview and/or opinion, to a behavior that involves interaction. There is a fundamental assumption ignored here in LBT, in other forms of consciousness-first intervention strategies, and by many people who think they can elevate their argumentative skills to the point of a magic spell: biology. Thought doesn’t come first as some kind of system built on biology, but rather is an add-on to the biology that already existed.

Let’s take Cohen's example of social rejection by friends. One of the so-called “Cardinal Fallacies” is that of the fallacy of Self-Damnation, which leads to the declaration, according to Cohen, that “if one’s self-worth depended on someone else’s approval, then we’d all be “rejects” (which is absurd!) since all of us have been rejected by others.”

There are several issues involved in this example, but let’s focus on the underlying assumption that one’s self-assessment shouldn’t be tied to what others think. We are fundamentally social creatures, not simply because we come from families and form groups, but more broadly, the very substance of our notion of self is tied to relationships.

Every interaction offers you a chance to “see” your self. In fact, the only way to see your self is through social interactions. (from “Selfless” by Brian Lowery)

Ignoring the biological, and by extension evolutionary, underpinnings of the mind is never a helpful way to start determining a course of self-understanding. As Lowery notes above in his excellent book, the substance of a self is relationally constructed, rather than individually. The social construction makes far more sense biologically, as genetics operates through kinship, and any moral system will stem from that basis in social connectivity. Determining who is and isn’t part of the in-group, a determination required by evolution and civilizational development, places the very nature of individual identity within social bonds.

With this framework in mind, one’s self-worth is very much dependent, necessarily though not sufficiently, on other people’s approval. This kind of thing often comes up in therapy for me, where the frustration is expressed as a desire to learn not to care about anyone’s opinion. My rejoinder is to ask what kind of person they think acts without a single care at all about the judgment of others, with the response being one thing: a sociopath. Now, is all rejection warranted? Of course not. But that’s a different question to ask than whether rejection itself is a fallacy.

Acknowledging our social foundation, itself a product of the particular biological nature that we are, is to also note the backwardness of placing conscious thought as primary. Yes, it’s backward. Again, based on naturalism, conscious thought is an emergent experience arising from unconscious, and therefore inaccessible, processes, none of which even resemble conscious experience. This highlights the deceptive nature of verbiage, as an un-conscious seems to indicate there are events going on within the brain in the same way that conscious thought is being experienced (note that this is why mind-reading, besides being a fantasy, also would never actually work the way fantasists think of it). However, this is like saying that experiencing a hurricane is equivalent to noting the meteorological mathematics that went into its formation.

Syllogisms do not generate emotions. Instead, syllogisms are the post-hoc verbalizations of a mind/brain having already generated an affective judgment. This stems from a predictive processing model of human biological cognition, the best-to-date understanding we have about how our natural embodied nervous systems — of which the brain is one, admittedly large, part — make decisions for allocating resources.

“…the primary task of all the prediction machinery in our heads is to help us stay alive. A major part of that staying alive involves keeping our own inner bodily states within the surprisingly tight bounds of biological viability. That means acting and responding in ways that help create and maintain the many inner physiological states essential to our continued existence as a living organism. To do this, our predictive brains must also target and proactively control a variety of crucial internal physiological conditions.” (from “The Experience Machine” by Andy Clark)

Simply correcting a conscious sentence doesn’t touch the generative model that gave rise to the sentence itself. The thought has already shown up, itself felt to be a validation of the initial emotional judgment. This is why I often refer to these practices as internalized gaslighting, in which we try to convince ourselves that we had absolutely no reason to form that judgment. The reality is, we most certainly did: the preconscious assessment that was completed automatically and without conscious deliberation, based on the social situation. LBT, like CBT, would have us constantly judging our thoughts themselves as deliberate errors we chose because we were tripped up by a fallacy. And yet, as I have pointed out previously, none of us actively choose the conscious thoughts we have. They just appear.

The real fallacy to be concerned with here is the false notion of how the mind works. Without a naturalistic basis in understanding the embodiment of our consciousness, we will forever be fighting the wrong battle. It’s little wonder so many have been convinced that therapy takes a long time, because that deception rests on the false assumption that they need to fight against the reality that their brain evolved just like everything else, and that its purpose is not to pursue truth but to manage resources.

LBT is correct in one of its steps: adopting a new philosophy. One that doesn’t falsely separate emotion and reason as if they’re two separable systems, rather than parts of a whole. One that acknowledges we are evolved creatures, embedded in various levels of social connectivity, and embodied in physiological expressions of a fundamentally natural order of things.

Acceptance is where all of this should lead us. Acceptance that our thoughts are not things we choose. Acceptance that what we think is less about identifying truths of reality and more about structuring how we spend our time in the giving and pursuing of limited resources, predominantly our attention. Acceptance that errors in judgment are not errors in identity, but the inevitable outcome of a brain that makes guesses based on limited data and previous limited experience.

We are wholly and utterly human. Mistakes are inevitable. Don’t forget your towel.

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David

You didn’t just stop believing something. You lost the system that provided the structure for who you are, who you belong to, and what to do next. That’s not a simple change in opinion. That’s a collapse. And it’s why leaving a totalizing belief system feels less like closing a book and more like the floor going out from under you.

The key to consider right now is that this period of disorientation, however strong it may be to you personally, is part of a natural, inevitable process in recalibrating how you interact with the various parts of your life, including the story you have of yourself. I do believe strongly that you, like anyone, are fully capable of investigating, trying new things out, and developing the tools for the ongoing meaning-making journey that is your life.

Presentation:

Nanocon Moving On From Deconversion

1.48MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Worksheet for Reflection:

Moving On From Deconversion Handout

151KB ∙ PDF file

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Download

Further Reading:

Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science, by Mark Johnson

Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times, by Stephen Batchelor

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David

Values are not simply ideas we hold; they are the roadmap to the destinations we seek to embody, and, by extension, the person we are becoming in every unfolding day. Looking at values through a consequentialist lens means taking ownership of what we are and are not willing to struggle with to support what we care about. Everything in life has an opportunity cost, where what is engaged in means not being able to engage in something else, certainly not at the same time. Further, everything we do has second- and third-order ripple effects that we may not appreciate, but are inevitable parts of the life package that decisions come in.

What you say yes to. What you say no to. These are the boundaries that define the structure for the meaning and purpose you’re developing as a life you’ve decided is worth living. They are also signals to those others in your life about the degree of connection between what you say and what you follow through with.

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Although there are no souls or nonphysical minds, no immutable selves, although there is no such thing as free will, there are still, at the end of the day, persons. What is a person? A conscious social animal that deliberates, reasons, and chooses, that is possessed of an evolving or continuous—but not a permanent or immutable—identity, and that seeks to live morally and meaningfully.

-Owen Flanagan, “The Problem of the Soul”

There is a pervasive problem: even in social circles where biological evolution is an established scientific truth, few want to apply it to any area above the neck. It is as if nature took a holiday when it came to the brain or mind and said to itself, sorry, that’s too complicated, I’ll leave it alone and let the ephemeral take over. Within Western Christianity, this often manifests in references concerning the imago dei, or “image of god” as it alludes to the mind or seat of the soul or intellect, where we may receive all new bodies but retain our soul/mind. Within secular communities, typically more liberal politically, this avoidance of the brain/mind as operating under evolutionary constraints like the rest of the body, manifests in variations of declaring that social constructionism, the malleability of the person through social means, and, particuarly in more recent days, the elevation of individual thought as lived experience capable of transcending human bias by virtue of possessing one or another immutable characteristic considered sacred through pereceived oppression. Regardless of the source for one’s capacity to transcend the immediately material, soul or personal declaration, the result is an impressively naive abnegation of interpersonal influences and a tendency to ignore the innate biased qualities of cognition in favor of identity-based righteousness.

“We are not like them” is truly the mentality that unites everyone.

Except, despite the desire to remove oneself from the natural world in ways that support one’s desired social exclusionary conclusions, none have actually done so. We are all, every one of us, embodied and embedded in natural systems that we are incapable of seeing our way out of. Case in point: attempt to choose the next thought/emotion you have. Seriously. Try it. You are now having the thought of choosing the next thought. Right. Did you choose that thought though? At what point do you stop and humbly acknowledge that the thoughts/emotions providing the substance of what you consider to be your experience are just appearing seemingly from nowhere, and certainly not without any conscious deliberation? How far will you go to deny this fundamental aspect of human experience, that we do not choose what to think, only that once thought has appeared do we have a limited capacity of influencing what we then do with it?

Consciousness, whatever it may be (the jury is still very much in deliberation), could be many things, but it isn’t magic. It does not remove us from the natural order of things, of a cause/effect universe. There are undoubtedly more things in the totality of reality than are currently dreamed up in our philosophies (thank you, Hamlet), and certainly the simplicity of singular cause to singular effect is an insufficient framework for understanding reality, but the complexity only increases the burden of accepting that we are, every one of us, biological creatures and but one of a virtually infinite manifestation of natural reality, constrained by the specifics of our species’s character.

Just What Is It To Be Human?

Just what is it, then, to be human? We cannot help but act, as even the activity of being silent in contemplation is still a behavioral manifestation of our biology. So the real question isn’t what we do, but in what direction are we going? It’s a question that comes up often in my work in mental health: the issue of motivation, which is often framed as a problem of getting started, as if the person hasn’t already engaged in the behavior. What I immediately reframe is that instead of getting started, the inquiry should be about identifying which direction has already been engaged in and, depending on the consequences of said behavior, determine whether that is still acceptable or if change is desired.

This focus on direction is better captured by the Latin word vitae. Meaning life, vitae captures the inherent movement quality that life embodies. To be absent of vitae is to be absent of life, of movement, i.e., to be dead. This is why arbor vitae, or “tree of life,” is such a beautiful metaphor for the interconnectivity of biological evolution. It is the movement of biological processes, manifesting in the variety of species' development, as each seeks, through various means, to grasp the ongoing need to perpetuate itself.

Vitae is closely connected to the Greek physis, or nature, from which we also get the term psyche or soul, though an astute observer will also note the etymology of psyche being foundational to psychology. More on that in a moment.

While it is standard since Descartes, and to some degree earlier, to differentiate nature and soul as metaphysical opposites or as pertaining to different substances, i.e., the natural and the supernatural, historically the separation was not so clean. (The following is taken from Cornford’s “From Religion to Philosophy”). Anaximander, one of the great thinkers of the Milesians and associated with pre-Socratic philosophy, speculated on nature, but modern thinkers would not find much to compare it to easily, despite using the same word. The Milesians were known for the phrase “the All is alive” as a way to declare that the universe has a “soul” in it. Again, despite its use, “soul” is not meant to convey the same meaning people today often use it for, as it now carries so much reflective baggage of post-Enlightenment thinking. By “soul,” what was meant was more simply to be alive, to move, as in nature is self-moving and therefore alive. This is why there is so much overlap in the use of the term vitae, as the Greeks sought to capture life as an animating principle, not simply to refer to it in the reductionist and yet still very useful way as “matter” in the later Newtonian sense.

Now we return to what it means to be human, as we reflect on our physis and the vitae of our inevitable movement as living creatures. We are possessed of an animating principle where we are not passive creatures but meaning-making conscious manifestations of nature’s variability. To paraphrase Carl Sagan: we are the universe experiencing itself.

Demystifying the Spiritual

To be a meaning-making creature does not require a well-considered and academically rigorous ideological structure. At its most basic level, meaning-making is simply the connective tissue between consciousness and ongoing activity, between the individual and the interconnected variables that make up our constantly evolving context that we find ourselves embedded within. In my work with others, and as a philosophic principle for myself, this is boiled down to how Values are supported in action. As previously stated, it is not so much whether any of us are moving, but in what direction we are doing so.

As biological creatures, we are always constrained by the limits of our resources, and the need to use them in efficient ways. The surplus of neurons that contribute to our conscious lives provides us with a capacity to imagine futures less restrained by mere instinct. This provides a means of both contemplating and planning for an expanding number of possibilities, though this also is a double-edged sword for sowing discord in ourselves and with others as we then act on that imagined future as if it were in the present.

This capacity for imagining futures, of predictively processing possibilities, is what sets us apart within the animal kingdom. We do so through beliefs or psychological constructs, mental associations that are contextually determined to guide our activity within social interactions, connecting us with the ever-collapsing future that we call the present. It is impossible to contain the totality of nature’s variables in our brains, and therefore this biological constraint or limitation means we are forever creating constructs that serve our human purposes. We cannot stop ourselves from always picking and choosing parts of reality to fit what is useful in reaching outcomes we believe are helpful. This isn’t something we remove ourselves from. At best, through reflection, dialogue, and psychological tools like ideologies or worldviews, we develop better ways of funneling the immensity of natural reality into increasingly more productive and ethical ways of living, but we are none of us able to remove ourselves from our embodied nature.

In this light, the usage of spirituality can be simply a recognition of our vitae, our animating principle. It is the acknowledgment that we are not passive recipients of nature’s information, but active co-creators of meaning. This does not require the additional complication of a supernatural, as what we are does not require anything more than the natural for the manifestation of meaning, the development of purpose, and the active involvement in community-building.

The aversion many have within secular communities to the use of spirituality is a legitimate hangover from the limitations and destructive qualities that dogma placed on it. Thankfully, we are not beholden to those former constraints. Neither you nor I must give up the notion of community despite previous dogmatic assertions to “not forsake the assembly,” any more than any of us need give up contemplations of ethics despite previous authoritarian demands to adhere to rigid hierarchies.

What binds us all together in this human endeavor is a bone-deep need to connect our actions to a meaningful structure beyond our immediate selves, to identify how what we do in the present connects us to our imagined futures. None of us are removed from this need, and despite an ongoing cognitive illusion regarding our capacity to transcend our natural world, our brains are as much a part of it as our stomachs and spleens.

Rather than running away from the use of the term “spiritual” as a stand-in for directed purpose, we can use it, like any other verbal tool, to direct our attention to the process we are constantly engaged in: meaning-making. And if you still don’t like the term, that’s ok too. Use another. That’s the beauty of life; it isn’t reduced to one form.

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Sometimes to really get to know someone, you need to get past the formalities, the assumptions, and the internet insanity, and just have a conversation. That’s what I found in talking with Brit Hartley, Religious Deconstruction Coach from No Nonsense Spirituality.

Brit’s dedication is to exploring the human experience without relying on dogmatism or authoritarian ideologies, and supporting people in their journeys for self-discovery. We talk about that need, and the antipathy some have, particularly in secular circles, to anything that smacks of religiosity, even as that fear cuts people off from the many nuances of human experience and the bonds we are all seeking to build.

As Brit notes on her site, in describing the service she provides:

• No belief required - We can explore spirituality, meaning, ritual, and connection without asking you to believe things you do not believe.

• Deconstruction without demolition - We look honestly at what religion harmed, what it gave you, and what you want to carry forward.

• Psychology before Theology - We explore the human needs beneath belief: belonging, identity, certainty, purpose, morality, and connection.

• Meaning that fits your actual life - Rather than replacing one rigid system with another, we build a framework that reflects your values, personality, relationships, and lived experience.

As the conversation shows, I could not agree more and find that what is important in creating a life of active meaning-making is to move forward with what you’re for, what I refer to as values, rather than losing yourself in the destructive battle of what you’re against.

I hope you enjoy the free-flowing chat as much as I did, and definitely check out Brit’s work.

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Genuine self-knowledge is, no doubt, exceptionally difficult to attain, and the truth about what we are may certainly be distressing. In our efforts to conduct our lives successfully, however, a readiness to face disturbing facts about ourselves may be an even more critical asset than a competent understanding merely of what we are up against in the outside world. -Harry G. Frankfurt, “On Truth”

Self-knowledge is not, contrary to how it may at first intuitively follow, simply a matter of paying attention to your thoughts. This is because your thoughts are not under the control of any “you” that sits there in the center of the mind, pulling strings like Loki at the end of the fabulously well-done series of the same name. There is no “you” that is the master of your domain, or any domain for that matter. Instead, you are a perspective on those thoughts, reflecting on them but never choosing them, quite often showing up like uninvited guests at a party you threw together at the last minute.

Pause for a minute and try to choose your next thought. Did it work? Did you select one from a myriad of possibilities? What about the thought that was supposedly thinking about the choosing? Did you select that one? Or have they all just been popped into existence, one by one, never stopping, never ceasing? Even when you’re unconscious, thoughts don’t stop, creating, whether you recollect them or not, fantasy worlds of connections bound by rules you don’t have access to nor choose to adhere.

All of this should result in a level of humility, yet quite often we bring hubris to the experience of our lives. We declare our allegiance either to the belief that the uncontrollable is beyond control or to the egoism that believes every thought is sacred and important.

This presentation seeks to address that hubris and remind us that just because it’s in our heads, it doesn’t mean we have to take it seriously. In fact, it’s likely better if you don’t more often than not.

Read more

Guest post by Jill Palmer

For busy professionals, caregivers, and community members trying to make steady decisions in everyday life, an unpredictable world can turn simple plans into moving targets. The core tension is clear: constant change demands attention, yet the mind has limits, and managing uncertainty can slide into overwhelm. Mental resilience is the capacity to stay functional under pressure and recover momentum after setbacks, and future-proofing the mind means strengthening that capacity before challenges arrive. With the right adaptability skills, general readers can respond to disruption with steadier judgment and more consistent follow-through.

Understanding Resilience as Adaptability

At its core, resilience is not toughness at all costs. It is the flexible skill of staying open to change, meeting uncertainty with curiosity instead of fear, and learning as you go. A practical starting point is the idea that adaptability means you can adjust to new conditions without losing your sense of direction.

This matters because rigid thinking turns surprises into crises. When you treat unknowns as information to gather, you make calmer choices and recover faster after mistakes. Over time, lifelong learning helps build the mental flexibility that keeps you effective under pressure.

Picture a sudden shift in work priorities. Fear says, “I’m behind,” but curiosity asks, “What changed, and what’s the next best move?” You adapt by updating your plan, asking one clarifying question, and building one new skill. That same approach becomes especially real during career changes and barriers at work.

Turn Career Upheaval Into a Resilience Training Ground

Career shifts, whether chosen or forced, can become a practical workout for resilience because they require you to stay steady while the “rules” change. Each transition asks you to tolerate uncertainty without freezing, to treat the unknown as information you can learn from, and to keep your identity flexible enough to spot new opportunities rather than cling to a single path. That mindset naturally strengthens continuous learning: you update skills, rethink what you’re good at, and remain open to roles you might not have considered when conditions were more predictable.

This matters because research suggests that as burnout and dissatisfaction rise, many employers are emphasizing external hiring over developing the talent they already have. The result can be widening skills gaps and fewer growth pathways, pressures that affect workers and organizations alike.

Everyday Habits for a Future-Proof Mind

These habits turn resilience from a nice idea into a trainable skill. When you practice them consistently, you build mental flexibility that holds up through surprises, setbacks, and big life changes.

Three-Breath Reset

● What it is: Pause, take three slow breaths, and unclench your jaw and shoulders.

● How often: Daily, before difficult conversations or decisions.

● Why it helps: It interrupts stress autopilot and restores clearer thinking.

Name the Feeling, Choose the Next Step

● What it is: Label the emotion, then pick one helpful action you can do in 10 minutes.

● How often: Daily, whenever you feel stuck.

● Why it helps: It builds emotional agility instead of avoidance.

Two-Line Learning Log

● What it is: Write what worked today and what you will try next time.

● How often: Weekly.

● Why it helps: It turns setbacks into usable feedback.

One Reach-Out Message

● What it is: Send a check-in text or voice note to someone you trust.

● How often: Three times per week.

● Why it helps: Supportive relationships buffer stress and widen perspective.

The “Good Day” Micro-Optimism Prompt

● What it is: Ask, opening the door just a crack as your cue, “What could make today okay?”

● How often: Daily, especially on hard mornings.

● Why it helps: It nudges realistic optimism without denying problems.

Resilience Questions People Ask Most

Q: What does “future proofing your mind” actually mean?
A: It means building skills that help you adapt when plans change, not trying to predict every problem. Look for faster recovery, clearer choices under pressure, and fewer spirals after a hard moment. Pick one practice and measure progress by how quickly you return to your baseline.

Q: How do I stay consistent when life gets chaotic?
A: Reduce the habit until it fits your busiest day, then keep that version. Tie it to something already reliable, like brushing your teeth or starting the car. Consistency comes from making the action easy to start, not from willpower.

Q: When I miss a day, should I start over?
A: No. Treat it as a data point, not a failure, and restart with the smallest next step. A quick note about what knocked you off track can help you prevent the same snag next week.

Q: How do I know if these practices are improving my mental health?
A: Track one simple signal for two weeks, like sleep quality, irritability, or how long it takes to calm down after stress. Research links resilience with both negative indicators of mental health and positive indicators of mental health, so small gains are meaningful. If your signals worsen for several weeks, consider extra support.

Q: Can I build resilience if I feel anxious or overwhelmed most days?
A: Yes, and starting small is often the safest approach. Begin with one calming action that helps quiet your mind such as slow breathing, a short walk, or a brief meditation. If anxiety feels unmanageable or includes thoughts of self harm, reach out to a professional right away.

Commit to Lifelong Adaptability Through Resilience and Learning

Change will keep testing attention, confidence, and emotional balance, and the hardest part is staying steady when progress feels uneven. The goal is not perfect control, but lifelong adaptability built through an ongoing learning mindset, supportive connections, and regular mental strength reinforcement. Over time, this approach improves future readiness by making setbacks informative rather than defining, and by motivating mental growth instead of avoidance. Resilience is a practice of adapting, not a performance you pass or fail.

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David

The fundamental nature of mental health therapy, and I would argue, mental health itself, is that of interconnection. Relationships aren’t just what we pursue for intimacy, marriage, friendship, and professional growth, but are the foundational building blocks of how we create and derive meaning/purpose from life. For many, the professional relationship found in mental health counseling is a nearly sacred thing, reminiscent of the one found with one’s local priest and the sacred space of the confessional. Indeed, I would argue, and often do, that therapy is the secular equivalent of the role that a priest/reverend/pastor used to take, but as Western civilization, and more specifically the United States, moves away from identifying with a specific religious group (not to be confused with giving up religious ideas), mental health therapy has filled the void left.

How mental health has supplanted religious ideology with a secularized structure for deriving meaning in life is the subject of another time, but it does point to a reason why people find any encroachment by technology into it so objectionable. The sacred is not to be touched, and certainly not by the inhuman advent of Artificial Intelligence.

For years, therapists have been lamenting the commodification of therapy, derisively looking at companies like BetterHelp and others as leeching off the public and not giving therapists their due. Given the overwhelming majority of therapists being identified with liberal, or, more accurately, progressive, political ideology, part of the criticism typically involves some vague declaration that “capitalism” is harming everyone involved. The amusing part here is that therapists are among the most vociferous users of capitalist principles, seeking to keep supply down to increase demand and, therefore, increase prices. Therapists typically see clients only 15-25 hours per week when they’re independently running their own business, meaning that to make enough to live a small six-figure life, they have to charge approximately $200/hour. Additionally, the usual frequency of therapy is weekly, and it’s not unusual to continue for years. This means there are a few hours a week for therapists to see people, and they fill those hours with a select group of people who can afford it, which lets them raise their own prices even as the majority of people scramble to be helped.

The cultural milieu in which all of this is occurring is one that, encouraged by therapists and the industry as a whole, calls upon everyone to engage in therapy as the means for addressing any and all aspects of human experience (there’s that religious association again). Companies like BetterHelp, which face several legitimate criticisms, are simply addressing the need created by therapists and the broader industry. If every part of human experience is increasingly pathologized, and the only way to address that supposedly brokenness is through the sacred teachings as expressed in therapy, and that therapy is increasingly only provided by an expensive, narrow elite class, then it’s little wonder that companies have grown to meet that social need.

Therapy wasn’t commodified by these companies; it was already commodified by an educated class that declared to everyone that humanity itself is a problem, and that the only solution is attending a weekly service delivered by a state-sanctioned (i.e., licensed) officiant.

The AI Pushback

The increasingly shrill declarations against AI by the therapeutic industry are one of deep hypocrisy. An increasing number of therapeutic notes are being written not by therapists but by AI bots, specifically designed to gather information and present it in a structured format for diagnostic and insurance purposes. I’ve shaken my head in self-critical laughter at an industry that uses AI to write notes and treatment plans, only for insurance companies to then audit those notes and treatment plans with AI as well, effectively making it so that a practice built on the many variations of human connection devolves into computer programs making sure everyone is speaking the same language.

Beyond hypocrisy, the criticism of using AI in therapy would be more valid if the focus were grounded in efficacy. Instead, it’s about the fear of being supplanted. It’s about the fear of finding out that an industry built on standardization and rote delivery of interventions, where a lack of critically informed scientific and philosophical understanding of human nature is a feature rather than a bug, is not actually delivering on its promise. If an AI chatbot, or some variation, can deliver an equivalent level of reflective engagement, and the client/patient feels heard and helped, and it doesn’t cost them the equivalent of a small mortgage payment, who is going to be against this? Rather, who is going to be against this, whose real concern is diminishing human suffering?

The proverbial cat is out of the bag on many of the criticisms because they aren’t about efficacy. Instead, they’re focused on attempting to curtail therapy to only that which can be done directly by humans. This is an extension of how therapy is already defined, by the way.

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines psychotherapy as:

Psychotherapy is a collaborative treatment based on the relationship between an individual and a psychologist.

To attempt to clarify, the APA stipulates that psychotherapy “involves communication between patients and therapists that is intended to help people.”

“Intended to help” is the therapeutic version of “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Notice that nothing here has anything to do with specific interventions, modalities, or theoretical orientations. What is therapy? Effectively? That which occurs between the state-sanctioned therapist and patient. That’s it. Outside of ethical violations, which are very narrowly construed (for good reason), almost anything that occurs between a therapist and a patient is therapy.

Now, there is, of course, a great deal to be said about whether what occurs in therapy is actually therapeutic. A great many of my own clients have found me precisely because previous therapist interventions were emotionally and relationally destructive, and they’re looking for someone who has a healthy critical skepticism of modern therapy practices, and doesn’t think pathologizing normal human expression is a good thing. However, the APA and the ACA are not primarily in the business of policing their industry. This is where many conversations between therapists turn into pissing contests about what is and isn’t therapy, when what they likely mean is “therapeutic,” but saying so wouldn’t address what’s at issue: creating barriers to access.

So if therapy is merely a professionally sanctioned relationship, then what happens if the techniques and interventions can be distilled to a programmatic relationship delivered through a screen?

AI is the Therapist You’ve Been Looking For

Amusingly, and I’m not sure yet whether I’m laughing in genuine humor or horror, the American Psychological Association wants us to be afraid of AI, very afraid. To that end, they recently released a set of statements on social media warning of the supposed dangers of AI.

The problem? Almost everything the APA says that AI does is what the human therapist does. Below are the posts, with my comment in pink.

The irony here is pretty amazing. In attempting to scare people away from AI, the APA has instead succeeded in saying that the real problem is therapy. Of course, they don’t mean therapy, because again, therapy is only that which occurs “between an individual and a therapist,” so by definition, an AI can’t give therapy.

But what if it’s therapeutic? That’s the really difficult question to ask, isn’t it? Can a conversation with an AI be therapeutic? Does it, by the perception of the individual, provide support and help in times of distress? Increasingly, people are saying it does.

Whether something is helpful is a complicated question, worth far more exploration than I have room for in this article. As well, contrary to how it may initially appear, my criticisms of the APA declarations against AI are not because I disagree with their warnings. I simply apply those concerns to therapy itself as well. I do so because I don’t think psychotherapy, innately, has the solutions to human suffering, and indeed, may very well often contribute to it.

The nearly two decades I’ve been involved in mental health work, and the degrees I’ve gotten and am still pursuing, have led me to one inescapable conclusion: the hubris of humanity in thinking they’ve found a single solution to anything is a failure of critical imagination. Mental health is not something to be solved. Your humanity is not something to be considered broken, at war with itself, or separated, parceled out, and commodified through diagnosis.

Will involving AI help with our media-declared mental health “crisis”? Maybe. Maybe not. But if your therapist can be replaced by a bot, any criticism shouldn’t be placed on the bot.

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David

With over 200 articles written, there can be some difficulty in finding ones that are specifically useful on a particular topic or theme. While on occasion I write an article that is time-sensitive, most of what I write is evergreen, e.g., it’s useful no matter when you read it. My focus is on principles rather than pop analysis, though that can certainly be fun and interesting as well.

With that in mind, here is a collection of articles connected by the idea of exploring the mistaken assumption that feelings, thoughts, and values are direct windows onto truth. Feelings are signals pointing to what matters, not verdicts; thoughts are frequently unreliable noise rather than accurate maps; values are the underlying architecture steering every decision, often invisibly; and when a totalizing framework like religious certainty collapses, the predictive “map” itself dissolves, exposing how much of selfhood was constructed rather than discovered.

Read in order, the argument I’m promoting is for treating inner experience as functional and tentative, demanding active interpretation rather than passive trust. This is especially true when coming out of authoritarian ideologies or mindsets that curtailed questions and demanded you think of yourself through a singular lens.

1

2

3

4

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Thanks!

David

Share

Feelings often get bad press, because they are viewed as contrary to, or in opposition to, the supposed pinnacle characteristic of righteous humanity: our rationality. This is not at all an accurate appraisal of what feelings are, but as a socially sanctioned means for avoiding the nature of our humanity, such a view does a really good job.

Let’s consider feelings as part of the continuum in our assessments of the nature of reality, who we are, and as an initial point of reference for how we’re going to behave in support of who we believe ourselves to be.

Read more

This is the first of an ongoing series for Humaty’s Values targeting specific topics and themes for personal development. Each presentation will be approximately 30 minutes long and include handouts and articles for further reading, reflection, and engagement.

The first lesson is free, but the remainder will be for paid subscribers. I want to encourage people to use these as ongoing points of contact for reflection with the general philosophy and principles I write about and teach in therapy and consultation services. Use the lessons in groups, and if that means only one of you has a paid subscription, so be it, though of course I’d greatly appreciate more signing up. The growing online community of paid subscribers is here as well.

If there are any topics you’d like to see covered, reach out and let me know.

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Values Part One Questions

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Values Part Two Questions

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Values Part Three Questions

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Values Light Way

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Values Discussion Questions

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David

In one of the many philosophically laden scenes in the “Matrix” movies, the character Neo is visiting the Oracle to determine whether he has what it takes to be a digital savior for all the mech-using humans currently living in what can only be described as a Titan-sized plumber’s paradise. Seriously, I love sci-fi movies, but the extent of the infrastructure often built in a ridiculously short time truly boggles the mind. No other movie (to my immediate recollection) comes close to “The Minority Report,” where, somehow, vast highways for single-person pod-cars have been built in less than a few decades from the current timeline. I understand that writers lean more toward fiction than science, and maybe putting in ridiculously large infrastructure projects is meant to inspire, but every time I see something like it on screen, I can’t help but laugh at how the show has gone from sci-fi to fantasy.

Back to the Oracle, though I promise the sojourn into a pet peeve concerning sci-fi shows is relevant (mostly), Neo is confronted with the Delphic declaration of “Know Thyself.” Carved into stone at the entrance to Apollo’s temple in Delphi, Greece, the statement can serve as a window into the degree of hubris each civilizational period has contained over the last couple of millennia. To what degree can anyone know themselves? Better, is there a singular self to know? And this will really bake your noodle: is there even a self to know at all?

In Francis Fukuyama’s book “Identity,” he notes a shift in contemporary thinking about the nature of the self, in which the distinction between inner and outer identity has led to a preoccupation with and ascendancy of the so-called inner or authentic self, beyond outward behavior and appearance.

“The foundations of identity were laid with the perception of a disjunction between one’s inside and one’s outside. Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society. The modern concept of identity places a supreme value on authenticity, on the validation of that inner being that is not being allowed to express itself. ” From: Fukuyama, Francis. “Identity.”

One of the results of this ascendency, as Fukuyama notes as well, is that previously the outer world served as a corrective to inner foolishness. We could imagine any number of things, but in their application, we would have to deal with the rest of reality — since we are not separate from it — which didn’t always follow our desires. Today, that relationship has flipped, such that the inner world has become the repository of truth — what is referred to as positional epistemology or “standpoint theory” — and if the outer world doesn’t conform, then it is at fault.

If you’ve heard the phrase “lived experience,” this is standpoint theory applied to individual psychology. If you’ve heard other phrases like “my truth,” or a preoccupation with supporting statements with “I feel,” this is positional epistemology at work. It is also the predominant tool for much of what passes for mental health therapy these days, alluded to in the declarations of finding the “real you” or “authentic self,” and in the advertising language of “you’re the expert of your own life.”

As one therapist expressed themselves:

This mentality is why people look for therapists who “look like me,” though the end result is that they are also looking for therapists who “think like me” and, most importantly, “validate me.” Carried to the logical — to many a bad word — conclusion, the standard for knowledge being put forward here makes it impossible for anyone to know anyone else. If a therapist has to “examine their own story” (as if there is only one), including delving into “all they had to hide of themselves” (another huge assumption, and if something is known it isn’t hidden, and if it’s hidden then the person doesn’t know it anyway), and only by doing this will they be able to “get” another person, then not only is the work never finished, if the client hasn’t done the same process, they won’t “get” the therapist either.

Note that in this description, the client doesn’t have to do any work, as it is assumed they already know themselves perfectly. They are, as it is often phrased, “experts” of themselves. Making this more confusing is that the statement about the therapist not understanding what meaning the client’s story has for them points to such meaning residing at an “unconscious" level. This means that the meaning is not accessible to the client either, despite later being assured that “you are the only one who knows about you.”

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Some may believe that I cherry-picked a singular comment to make my point, and I assure you, I did not. This is standard fare for therapeutic discourse. The inner world and the subjective have always been part of clinical work, which is why behaviorism sought to codify interventions and outcomes, moving away from the imaginative and non-falsifiable conjectures of psychoanalytic theory. That subjective report is still a part of psychological research is inevitable, since the current state of technology provides no way of mind-reading. The difficulties of subjective reporting, namely that people lie to themselves and to others, are inevitably prone to motivated reasoning, and are often answering different questions than what are actually asked, are all taken into consideration within research. That’s why you won’t, or rather you should never, see a definitive claim from science, particularly the social sciences, and instead every claim is probabilistically understood within narrow parameters.

Unfortunately, the incentives for elevating the subjective are strong, particularly when there’s a parallel push from the industry and elements of society as a whole to avoid discomfort, with validation replacing challenge. This is where you find the self-diagnosis movement in social media postings and increasingly from therapists as well. Here’s another statement from a therapist:

Again, I truly wish this were a minority opinion. Beyond the utter and complete lack of even an attempt at objectivity, this statement is coming from a group that mocks and belittles people from a different ideological bent, relying on their inner certainty when it comes to politically charged issues like COVID and vaccines. The lack of consistency isn’t just a feature of this thinking; it’s a central point. As is the case with so many statements of belief, they are not about articulating how the world works so much as signaling to others of like mind that they belong.

What is lost in all of this is any sense of humility, of a recognition that our biological evolution has only ever been focused on providing good-enough strategies for dealing with environmental constraints. The brain is no different than the rest of the body, despite how many people like to think the mind is somehow different, whether it be seen as the repository of the imago dei in Christian mythology, as possessing the power of context-free free will, or as the location of a singular transcendent self.

That’s something I would be inclined to yell from the rooftops, in the sense that one big barrier to achieving anything in the direction of self-knowledge is hubris, thinking that we do know, often confusing our confidence in our opinions with thinking that confidence is an indication of my degree of correctness. We feel sure, and take that surety itself to be evidence of the truth of what we think. (interview with Mitchell S. Green)

We are a species for which consciousness gives us the illusion of knowing about ourselves more than we actually do. Our rich and varied so-called “inner world” provides the enticements of certainty and emotional weight that Cypher from “The Matrix” is more than willing to step back into, despite doing so meaning he has to kill his friends.

Do any of you truly think you’ve stepped away from biology to not have this be an influence? We as a species have killed one another over religious mythology and imaginary lines drawn on maps. We get angry with people for behavior we imagine they’re doing, and judge ourselves for statements we imagine others are saying. We pretend with one another that the rules of driving are somehow intrinsic to the practice, and curb our behavior because of imagined social judgment about ignoring streetlights, even when nobody is coming from the other direction. We flip switches without — at least most of us — knowing how electricity and electrical engineering work, and push buttons to start cars without knowing how internal combustion engines and the electronics that are now ubiquitous function. We see a lack where there isn’t one and threats where there aren’t any. We mishear conversations all the time, and our memories are reconstructions rather than recollections.

Yet despite all this and so many other examples besides, when it comes to our day-to-day mental declarations, we go full speed ahead, heavily laden with hubris. And now we return to my amusing, to me, criticism of sci-fi movies, and the predilection they have for showcasing a world where the development of social cohesion to make massive infrastructure changes somehow overcame all the restrictions we know exist.

Dipping the toe into fantasy is a sign of that hubris in action, but we enjoy it because it provides hope for a future we’d like to step into. I can appreciate that desire. I’m hardly immune to it. Let’s just try not to mistake the desire for an outcome for what’s actually in front of us, and then not see all the work required to get to even an approximation of it. That’s true of community projects and our personal growth.

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Reach out to schedule a mental health session regarding issues related to existential difficulties, religious trauma, developing meaning/purpose, and the struggles of communication.

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How You Can Support the Newsletter

This post was free to read for all. If you like what I’m doing with The Humanity’s Values Newsletter and want to support my work, there are several ways you can do it.

1. Like and Restack: Click the buttons at the top or bottom of the page to boost the post’s visibility on Substack.

2. Share: Send the post to friends or share it on social media.

Share

3. Upgrade to Paid: A paid subscription gets you:

   • Full access to all new posts and the archive

   • Full access to all online classes on psychology and religious trauma

   • Full access to exclusive content such as weekly presentations on various topics of psychology and religion

   • The ability to post comments and engage in chat with the growing Humanity’s Values Newsletter community

Subscribe now

If you could do any of the above, I’d be very grateful. Readers like you help keep this newsletter going and growing.

Thanks!

David